Is the information new or unique?

Your first step toward developing promotable content is to ensure your content concept is somewhat unique. If your content is the same old story about your industry or brand the media will see right through that pitch.

Consider if there are experts or influencers you can interview to ensure your content is original and different from the existing competitive content landscape. In addition to exclusive interviews and expert insights, new research and data provide your content with an immediate boost of originality when pitching to media outlets.

If your broad content topic isn’t new, there might be a helpful, new content format that would aid the reader experience and provide more value to them through actionable insights tailored specifically to their situation. Take time to consider how you can plan innovative content formats that will present the information or data in a fresh and helpful way.

How will the content serve the journalist and their readers?

The next step in developing promotable content is to ensure that it will serve media contacts and their readers. Ideally, the content will align with and support the current reporting trends of industry publications. Media contacts will consider sharing your content when it can augment an existing story idea or bring a new story idea to the table.

The connection between the content and the larger trend should be easy to identify. The more you have to explain to make the connection between your content and the trend industry trend, the more difficult it will be to pitch to a media contact.

Ensure that your content does not favor the brand or show a product bias. It should never feel like a sales pitch to a reader. These kinds of content marketing mistakes will immediately eliminate your content from a journalist’s consideration.

The ultimate question to ask to ensure it will serve media and their readers is actually quite simple: Will this piece of content save the audience and journalist time, money or both? If you can answer yes to this question you are on the path to content promotion success.

Is the content properly optimized for reader engagement?

It’s crucial to remember the importance of user experience when developing new content. The experience had when visiting the web page hosting the content, as well as consuming the content itself, should be simple and painless. More than that, the experience should actually be engaging and interesting.

Remember that user experience must be optimized for a variety of audiences. Visitors could land on the page while exploring multiple pages of the hosting website. Media contacts or influencers may visit the page directly to consider sharing it with their own networks, while referral traffic to the page stems from earned media coverage. During content promotion campaigns, the hosting website and related content landing page need to be optimized around the content to inform referral traffic unfamiliar with your brand or website.

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Understanding content economics

As Mark Schaefer explained content shock in economic terms, the amount of content available [supply] is greater than the amount of content that can be consumed [demand]. The supply of available digital content is doubling every nine to 24 months, yet the demand for content is finite and quickly approaching a consumption limit.

This slight upward trend of consumption is not sustainable, as each person will eventually reach a limit to the amount of content they can consume. Businesses must prepare for the future of content shock and pivot to a content promotion mindset.

Businesses continue increasing content development

The conventional ways for content to reach an audience are more competitive than ever before. For businesses that means fewer page views, fewer conversions, fewer leads and fewer customers as a result.

Data from the Content Marketing Institute 2014 Survey affirms that brands are making big plans to continue expanding content marketing efforts in the next few years.

Today, 90 percent of B2C marketers and 93 percent of B2B marketers are creating content for their prospects and customers. As more and more companies pursue content marketing as a full-on strategy, earned media coverage will be crucial for brands to overcome content shock.

Affirming the increase in supply of content, 72 percent of B2C marketers and 73 percent of B2B marketers are producing more content than they did one year ago. As the market continues to flood with content, brands must place an increased emphasis on earning media coverage and endorsements from journalists, influencers, brands and advocates who already have large audiences.

Even with an increased emphasis on content marketing, only 34 percent of B2C marketers and 42 percent of B2B marketers consider their brands effective at content marketing. Marketers must learn that merely increasing content quantity or quality won’t guarantee effectiveness. Media coverage must be earned in order to get your content in front of the right people.

Perhaps most important of all, 60 percent of B2C and 58 percent of B2B marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget over the next 12 months.

Earned media crucial for content marketing success

If better content quality or quantity isn’t necessarily the answer then how should that expected content marketing budget increase be allocated? Investing resources to earn media coverage of your content will pay back in multiples.

Earned media will increase brand credibility and trust in the marketplace while also growing new audiences. As content marketing matures, businesses will thrive when they take the next step to include strategic earned media and promotion in their content marketing efforts.

For more tips on how to maximize the impact of your content through promotion and earned media, review The Content Promotion & Distribution Cheat Sheet.

Image credits: businessesgrow.com, Content Marketing Institute

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Content creation often overshadows content distribution and promotion, but don’t let your content distribution and promotion strategy take a back seat. Brands that wait for the right people to discover their content will lose critical momentum and find that organic content discovery isn’t happening as quickly or reliably as it once did.

Follow these three pieces of advice to prioritize distribution and promotion throughout the entire content development lifecycle.

1. Start, don’t end, the process with your media list.

Once a general content topic is identified, begin developing your ideal media list. The list can be updated as the content evolves, and it will serve as an excellent resource throughout the content development cycle. Using the target media list in addition to your full media distribution plan, you can guide the development of content that will meet the needs of journalists and bloggers at your target media outlets.

Often, brands only consider earned media efforts as an afterthought; but identifying target media outlets as early as possible is a crucial step in any content strategy.

Armed with your target media list, you can knowledgeably weigh in on content development throughout research, planning, and production to ensure it is something worthy of earned media coverage.

2. Develop unique content that aligns with the current media agenda.

When you prioritize media distribution and promotion, you add an additional audience to the mix. Now you’re not only creating content for your customers but for journalists and bloggers, too. Shift into the mindset of creating and distributing content that serves the journalists and readers of your target media outlets.

While they may align very closely, the target audiences of a business and a media outlet’s reader base will never be identical. Learn the differences and understand what kind of information readers seek when they read your target media outlet.

Use research to discover the current media trends around your brand and broader content topic. Through an analysis of existing content and news coverage, you can identify the current coverage trends and also forecast what will be relevant in the coming months.

3. Seek media feedback during content development.

In the early stages of content development, seek media feedback. Select some of your most desirable media placements and invite feedback from a few media contacts.

Use this opportunity to deepen your relationships with several key media contacts and also get a better understand of what types of content they feel will resonate best with their readers. By inviting input from a very niche group of media or influencers you will also nurture relationships for future earned media opportunities. This is also a helpful process to identify a few influencers who could contribute ideas to the final content.

These three steps can put you in front of the right outlets and the right audiences at the right time. For help with developing your content distribution and promotion strategy download this Content Distribution and Promotion Cheat Sheet.

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